Thanks very much to everyone who responded to my call for taxonomy help.
The most relevant single thing I learned was that I really didn't need a taxonomy at all, but a controlled vocabulary/thesaurus.
Following are the most useful links (for my particular project) that I culled from the responses and my own research, followed by the responses themselves.
Reference Materials
Thesaurus Building Tutorial
http://instruct.uwo.ca/gplis/677/thesaur/main00.htm
Willpower Information: "Publications on thesaurus construction and use"
http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/thesbibl.htm
Willpower Information: "Thesaurus principles and practice"
http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/thesprin.htm
Christina Wodtke : "Mind your phraseology!: Using controlled vocabularies to improve findability"
http://www.digital-web.com/tutorials/tutorial_2002-08.shtml
Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel: "Creating a Controlled Vocabulary"
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/creating_a_controlled_vocabulary.php
Karl Fast, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel: "Creating a Controlled Vocabulary: An Annotated Bibliography"
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/Facets_CV/Bibliography.htm
Amy Warner: "A Taxonomy Primer"
http://www.lexonomy.com/publications/aTaxonomyPrimer.html
ContolledVocabularies.com
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com
Montague Institute Review: "Ten Taxonomy Myths"
http://www.montague.com/review/myths.shtml
Existing Controlled Vocabularies
The American Society of Indexers list of online thesauri:
http://www.asindexing.org/site/thesonet.shtml
United States Library of Congress:
http://www.loc.gov/lexico/servlet/lexico
Traugott Koch: "Controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification systems available in the WWW"
http://www.lub.lu.se/metadata/subject-help.html
The Thesari of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, (UNESCO)
http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/index.htm
The WordHoard
http://www.mda.org.uk/wrdhrd1.htm
Steven Baum: "Online Dictionaries, Glossaries and Encyclopedias"
http://stommel.tamu.edu/%7Ebaum/hyperref.html
Anne Betz: "Classification schemes and thesauri on-line"
http://www.fbi.fh-koeln.de/fachbereich/labor/Bir/thesauri_new/indexen.htm
Michael Middleton: "Controlled vocabularies"
http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~middletm/cont_voc.html
Here are the responses I received:
Katherine,
I would like to recommend EEI Communications to you. They have built the sites for Smithsonian, and other federal agencies + corporate concerns. They also have one of the best 'web" schools on the east coast. You may want to hire them on in an assistant capacity.
Please see www.eeicommunications.com <http://www.eeicommunications.com/>, and <http://www.eeicommunications.com/newmedia/index.html> contact Stephen Colgan directly at (301) 495-9800. Please let me know if I may be of any more assistance to you.
Thanks!
Abbe Buck
www.highviz.net/federal.html <http://www.highviz.net/federal.html>
1-800-380-2825
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This is an article written for Boxes and Arrows on this subject. It might be worth a look. We were surprised at how little there is on this topic!
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/creating_a_controlled_vocabulary.php
Best of luck.
Mike Steckel
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
--------------------------------------------
Hi Katherine -
You have a tough job ahead of you. There really isn't anything written
about taxonomy development that's non-commercial, process-oriented and
specific to taxonomic hierarchies. Also, the tools for taxonomy development are limited and for the most part embedded in commercial products such as search and classification engines. In general, we're talking about a pretty labor intensive process. I've written a few things about taxonomy
development, and you're welcome to take a look, but the book remains to be written.
If you want to create a thesaurus, the picture is somewhat better. There are thesaurus management tools, primarily editors, but better than the Excel spreadsheets that I've used for many taxonomies. (They can also be used for taxonomies.) Check out the ones from MultiTes and Data Harmony, to name a couple. But here again, we're talking about a very labor intensive project.
Also, check out Amy Warner's article "A Taxonomy Primer" -
http://www.lexonomy.com/publications/aTaxonomyPrimer.html. Despite it's title, it's mostly about thesauri creation and there's a good bibliography attached.
There's a couple of links on the Home Page of my Web site that might be
useful - http://www.kcurve.com. The Powerpoint on the subject of Taxonomy and Software has some methodological discussion toward the end and many best practices. It's also pretty new; I did the research for a presentation last Spring. As you'll see from my papers, what makes a good taxonomy is the effort put in up front to determine who the audience is, what their information needs are, what vocabulary they use, etc., etc. I'm also attaching a paper that was published recently by the Montague Institute. It explores the relationship between taxonomies and usability. You might find some tidbits.
Good luck. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Marcia
Marcia Morante
KCurve, Inc.
(718)881-5915 - office
(917)821-2087 - mobile
http://kcurve.com
Effective Content Management for the Web
-------------------------------------------------------
Steve,
Here are some "taxonomy" related websites that may be of interest to Katherine. Although after quickly visting the Semaphore Partners website I am a little perplexed at her question. I provide these references as ones I have used in the past and have worked with a couple of the companies. Further, I am a little cautious about providing references without knowing more about the Semaphore needs/objectives/etc...you know the holistic top level considerations that need to be asked before embarking on a taxonmy (if that is really what they need) project. On closer inspection they may really just need a controlled vocabulary or maybe a more extensive thesaurus. It really depends on what they are wanting to do/accomplish.
Anyhow, with these caveats here maybe is some useful info:
Taxonomies
Montague Institute Review (myths about taxonomies): http://www.montague.com/review/myths.shtml <http://www.montague.com/review/myths.shtml>
Wordmap (practical implementation of web): http://www.wordmap.com/ <http://www.wordmap.com/>
Earley & Assoc (basic process): http://www.earley.com/development/easwebsite/eaweb2001.nsf/Content/EnterpriseTaxonomyDevelopment <http://www.earley.com/development/easwebsite/eaweb2001.nsf/Content/EnterpriseTaxonomyDevelopment>
Synaptica Inc (good white paper/tutorial): http://www.synaptica.com/taxonomies.asp <http://www.synaptica.com/taxonomies.asp>
Hope this is of some use,
Bert
James Bertolglio
----------------------------------------------------
Hi Katherine --
You might want to read my article, "Happiness is Taxonomy: Four Structures for Snoopy," which appeared in the March 2003 issue of "Information Outlook, the journal of the Special Libraries Association. In the article, I explain what a taxonomy is, how it relates to library classification, and then describe my experiences building a taxonomy for a major Charles Schulz licensee.
Thanks,
Katherine Bertolucci
Taxonomy and Information Management Consultant
Isis Information Services
P O Box 627
Phoenix, AZ 85001
602-258-2035
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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Katherine,
If you haven't already done so, you might want to take a look at the article that Karl Fast, Mike Steckel and I wrote for Boxes and Arrows on creating controlled vocabularies. It's available at: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/creating_a_controlled_vocabulary.php
When several colleagues and I worked on a large taxonomy project last fall, we simply developed the controlled vocabularies in Excel, using an indented format to indicate levels in the hierarchy. That seemed to be perfectly acceptable to the folks who were then transferring the vocabularies to the CMS.
If you'd like to talk about your project further, I'd be happy to discuss it with you.
Regards,
Fred
Fred Leise
Information Architect/Metadata Designer/Indexer
www.ContextualAnalysis.com <http://www.contextualanalysis.com/>
773-561-1993
------------------------------------------------------
Hi Katherine,
you could try Drupal <www.drupal.org>, an open-source (php-based) CMS that has a useful module to build taxonomy. I tried it and I found good. You can subscribe for an online use or install it on your server, or locally on your pc.
See <http://drupal.org/node/view/299>.
I suggest to install also the optional taxonomy-html module <http://drupal.org/drupal/4.2.0/modules/taxonomy_html.tgz>
For a faceted approach, I suggest Facetmap <http://facetmap.com/>
Ciao,
Luca
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Hello Katherine,
My name is Graeme Cox and I work for a company called Intology (Canberra
Australia). We may have some tools that are of interest to particularly:
1. KeyWord - automatically extracts key words and phrases from documents
as well as acronyms and their meanings.
2. Klarity Taxonomy Builder - takes the output of KeyWord (or other
sources) and uses this to build a taxonomy that can then be manually
manipulated. There are several outputs from this process, a taxonomy,
candidate thesaurus, exempla content against the taxonomy and key
words/phrases against the taxonomy.
If this is of interest to you, then I can provide you with further
information.
Regards
Graeme
-------------------------------------------------------
Katherine,
Like most librarians, I tend to get carried away with my information sharing. So, here is some general information on what we did and some sources for taxonomies. Let me know what is useful and what isn't.
The first rule is never "start from scratch." Most people don't have the kind of back ground that would allow them to build an in-depth taxonomy from scratch. We started with subject based thesauri. We needed taxonomies for medical sciences so we used portions of the MeSH, NIH CRISP and DOE Energy thesauri to build a very large taxonomy which was customized for the pharmaceutical sciences. When you use thesauri, you get deep taxonomies that come with hierarchies that are built by subject matter experts.
The American Society of Indexers has a list of online thesauri - http://www.asindexing.org/site/thesonet.shtml
You can also buy both taxonomies and thesauri from the Taxonomy Warehouse - http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/. This site has a good white paper "Synapse White Paper KMS101 - Taxonomies, Ontologies, Thesauri and Authority Files: The Key to Better Information Retrieval" http://www.synaptica.com/taxonomies.asp
We used terms from glossaries, book indexes and subject based dictionaries as sources for the marketing, human resources, and IT taxonomies. Book indexes are nice because they provide a directory like hierarchy. These resources won't provide a deep taxonomy but they seem to work.
My group built hierarchical taxonomies in a text editor, TextPad. They resembled thesauri without related terms. These taxonomies worked best with Semio because they had true broader and narrower terms and synonyms. This is how they looked (The exclamation points (main term), plus signs (synonyms) and negative signs (don't put that here) were part of the format used by Semio.)
!Vitamins
+vitamin
-a
-b 12
-b complex
-d
-e
-k
-u
!Ascorbic Acid
+ascorbic acid
!Dehydroascorbic Acid
+dehydroascorbic acid
!Bioflavonoids
+bioflavonoid
!Flavones
+flavon
+flavone
!Quercetin
+quercetin
!Hesperidin
+hesperidin
!Rutin
+rutin
!Vitamin A
+vitamin a
!Vitamin B Complex
+vitamin b complex
!Aminobenzoic Acids
+aminobenzoic acid
-4
!4-Aminobenzoic Acid
+4 aminobenzoic acid
+4-aminobenzoic acid
!Biotin
+biotin
!Carnitine
+carnitine
!Acetylcarnitine
+acetylcarnitine
!Palmitoylcarnitine
+palmitoylcarnitine
However, you can build flat lists of words and their synonyms that don't have a structure. These subject based lists can be used behind with a search engine to assist in precision and recall.
career event
career events
career event processes
career events processes
career event process
career events process
career development
career assessment
career assessments
career management
career opportunities
career opportunity
career plan
career planning workshop
career planning workshops
career planning
development courses and workshops
career center
career center faq
career center contact information
career test
career testing
lilly career center resource library
lilly career center
meyers brigg
meyers briggs
meyersbrigg
meyersbriggs
myers briggs
myersbriggs
personalized career counseling
personality test
personality testing
personality tests
personalize career planning
development plan
career development plan
career development
career goal
career management
career path
career planning
development planning
development plans
employee career planning
employee development plan
employee development plans
employee development resource catalog
employee development
employee needs assessment
employee skills assessment
idp
individual development plan
individual development
mentoring
advanced coaching
coaching
mentor
mentors
peer coach
shadowing
________________________________
Kathleen Ellis
Assistant Senior Information Specialist
Information Management Solutions
Eli Lilly and Company
Phone: 317-277-4071 Fax:317-277-2266
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Katherine:
There are a couple good PowerPoint presentations on Amy Warner's web site.Amy knows more about building taxonomies than anyone I know. Here's her web site:
http://www.lexonomy.com
Here's a page full of taxonomy-related resources, although I can't vouch for any of them:
http://www.sesdl.scotcit.ac.uk/taxonomy_links.html
I'm looking forward to seeing with what you come up with, because this is something I'm also interested in.
Thank you! Take care...
Jeff
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Katherine,
If by taxonomy you mean an actual formalized ontology, then I
recommend this article:
http://protege.stanford.edu/publications/ontology_development/ontology101-noy-mcguinness.html
It's based around Stanford's Protege, which is a fairly complex
ontology/taxonomy development tool (steep learning curve), but even
so, as good as anything else for building formally specified
taxonomies/ontologies, and free.
The article is good about addressing practical concerns for those
building taxonomies.
Best wishes,
Paul
__
paul ford // http://ftrain.com // 700,000 words all over.
Katherine K. Lumb Content Designer
p 646.336.3418 f 646.336.3444 [log in to unmask]
...................................................................................
Semaphore Partners www.semaphorepartners.com
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